Backups are worthless. Restores are priceless.02 Mar
What Exactly is a ‘Good Backup’?
Throughout my career, I have been told to “make sure you have a good backup”. Granted, this is a good practice to have, however as I have gotten further in my career, my definition of “good backup” has changed. I ask you to really think about what your definition of “good backup” is. Choose one:
- Installed – my computer guy installed backup software, I have this hard drive plugged in to the back of my system and he says it’s working automatically.
- Installed and Reporting – The backup system sends me a report each day to let me know whether it completed successfully or not.
- Minor Restores – We have restored files from the backup system before.
- Full System Restores Tested- We test the system regularly by performing full system restores.
Unfortunately, most people try to restore a backup only when it is really needed, and by then you’re already up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
Recent, Real-World Restores
In recent days, I had the dubious pleasure of having two separate customers need data restored. One customer needed a full server restored because of a hardware failure and another just needed data recovered.
Not Just a Backup; a Business Continuity Solution
“Customer 1″ just had us implement one of our DedicatedIT BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) appliances. Less than a week after implementation, their Terminal Server crashed hard. Because of the age of their hardware, we were unable to get the server back up and running. Here is where a business continuity solution excels: the appliance allowed me to ‘spin up’ the failed server’s backup as a virtual machine. It was up and running within four hours of the event. Not only did it come up exactly as it had been running prior to the crash, but our customer’s users are still utilizing the virtual machine’s image to this day (it’s been over a month now). We are scheduled to do a bare-metal restore of this system to their new Citrix XenServer installation in the coming week.
Able to Restore Gigabytes of Data Quickly and Easily
“Customer 2″ also just had us implement our DedicatedIT BDR appliance. Less than a month after installation, our service desk received a call from a user that lost Gigs of data ‘accidentally’. We all know what that means… “Oops! I hit delete and didn’t tell anyone until the next day, when I really needed the data back”. One of our technicians logged into their DedicatedIT BDR appliance, mounted the backup and restored all of the missing data within an hour and a half. Needless to say, the customer was delighted.
No Worries, No Stress
While each of these customers called in a panic, never were our employees concerned. Why? Because we do more than look to make sure that the backup “completed successfully”. We actually TEST our backup systems at least once per month.
Please, please, please make sure that your IT department is regularly checking your backups. You never want to have an emergency, reach for a backup, begin the restore and then find out that it doesn’t have all of the data required to restore your systems.
Shameless Plug for DedicatedIT BDR
These are real-world examples of how our managed backup service saved our customers. All customer names have been withheld to protect the innocent, but we know that our customers are sure that our services are priceless.
Here is a list of some of the features available in the DedicatedIT managed backup (and business continuity) service:
- Standby Server
- Disaster Recovery Testing
- Backup & Recovery
- Application Recovery
- Mailbox & Message Level Recovery
- Exchange Migration Functionality
- Bare Metal Restore
- Replication
- Offsite Storage
Telephone: 561-491-5750
Email: sales@DedicatedIT.com
Or for immediate help, Chat with a Solutions Expert
3 Responses to “Backups are worthless. Restores are priceless.”
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Backups are worthless, restores are priceless: http://tinyurl.com/bzwllr
In following up with this post, I wanted to let everyone know that restoration of the “Customer 1″ Failed Server to their new XenServer has been completed. As I have stated, the DedicatedIT BDR is, in many ways, perfect for this type of recovery. However, even with its awesome “bare-metal restore” capabilities, we found the one shortcoming: Backup was of a 200GB Image but only needed to be restored to a 32GB new server.
Imaging and Restoration, as I am sure many of you know, requires a same to same or larger environment for it to complete. Our BDR has the same limitation. So, to get the job done, we enlisted the assistance of another of my favorite “save-the-day” products: PlateSpin.
We loaded up a new XenServer VM with a 32GB Virtual Disk and used PlateSpin to migrate or ‘spin’ the BDR based VM to the new XenServer. Not only did it complete in 45 minutes, but it resized the original 200GB disk down to the new 32GB disk during the process. We were even able to do it as a ‘Live Migration’ so it was completed during business hours with only 5 minutes of downtime during lunch.
Got to love the tools available these days.
[...] have invested in your backup solution is worthwhile unless you test the recovery process. As this South Florida computer network support company always says: “Backups are worthless. Restores are [...]